A Catholic Response to the Mental Health Crisis

America, the wealthiest nation on earth, contains what I call a triangle of despair.  Mental Illness, incarceration, and poor quality of life creating a vicious cycle for too many, occurring all too frequently. A national disgrace.

How should Catholics respond to our mental health crises?  Many questions Christians must ask, to themselves, to their Churches and communities. Does this cycle begin with mental illness, something beyond the individual’s control? Is mental illness also created by one’s environment? I contend the mental health crisis in our country is exasperated by the imbalance of our inequitable economic systems and various faults of the Justice System.

Mental Illness

(One in Five Suffer)

Mental illness, a disease not of one’s own making, but an illness of genetics and/or created, intensified by outside stress on the fragile mind. Mental illness affects the mind, body, soul, those we love, those who love us, the entire community. The Church is clear that everyone, including the incarcerated, those with mental illness, etc., deserves respect and social justice:

Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. These rights are prior to society and must be recognized by it. They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy. If it does not respect them, authority can rely only on force or violence to obtain obedience from its subjects. It is the Church’s role to remind men of good will of these rights and to distinguish them from unwarranted or false claims (CCC1930).

Our society is short-sighted, seeking short-term solutions, thereby increasing current problems and costs, consequently forwarding them to the next generation. (What our responsibilities to them?) We avoid these unseen costs of economics, of jobs lost, families separated, lives ruined from lack of proper treatment. (But why?) A society refusing to accept long-term solutions, involving assorted long-term treatments, medications, therapies, and education for those who suffer, from any illness, commits expensive self-inflicted generational wounds. Why do we see the faults in others and not “remove the beam in our eyes”?

Financial Inequalities, Scarcity, and Resource Distribution

How can the world’s “richest” nation have and maintain such an expensive, unbalanced healthcare system?

The USA’s health system rating is 37th in WHO rating. We have neither a single-payer healthcare system where the government nor the private sector pays fully nor a multi-payer system where there’s insurance for people earning less than a certain minimum. Private one for those who earn more www.healthsystemtracker.org.

Charity: the theological virtue by . which we love God above all things for his own sake, and our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God (CCC 1822).

In our States, millions are without proper or any healthcare coverage. There are fewer psychiatric beds, hospitals, and treatment centers. What if, cancer centers closed? What if you were in medical distress with nowhere to turn? What if prisons offered more beds for your illness than hospitals?

Without access to hospital care, acutely ill individuals deteriorate, families and caregivers buckle under stress, ERs fill with severely ill patients waiting for an open bed, while police and fire responders find themselves increasingly diverted to mental health calls. By 2014, 10 times more people with serious mental illness were in prisons and jails than in state mental hospitals, a circumstance widely attributed to the shortage of beds providing timely treatment(Psychiatric Bed Shortages).

Why? How? One medical bill, a decrease in employment, an unexpected expense – all leading to catastrophe? Pay for food, rent, medication for yourself, spouse, or children? Ideas/programs based on ideals of the New Testament are denounced as ‘socialism’.

Lives destroyed.

The Federal Reserve reports 39% of Americans, currently don’t have enough money on hand to cover a $400 emergency…(The Motley Fool).

The U.S. has a retirement savingsdeficit of $4.3 trillion.

Imprisoning Those with Mental Illness

There is a direct correlation between the shortage of other mental health resources and incarceration.

• The nationwide medical consensus is a minimum of 50 beds per 100,000 population. England’s ratio, 2008 was 63.2/100,000.) Thirty-three states have below 20 beds/100,000. No state has more than 50/100,000. The Treatment Advocacy Center
• 2 million individuals living with mental illness, sit in jail and prison each year. Often their involvement with the criminal justice system begins with low-level offenses like jaywalking, disorderly conduct, or trespassing. . .
• Six out of 10 of the states with the least access to mental health care also have the highest rates of incarceration (Access to Mental Health and Incarceration).
• According to federal data, 40% of prisoners were diagnosed with a mental health disorder between 2011 and 2014. Every year two million people with psychological problems are jailed, based on estimates by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. A 2016 report by the Treatment Advocacy Center found that mentally ill prisoners stay locked up longer, cost more to house and are more likely to commit suicide and placed in solitary confinement (Imprisoning America’s Mentally Ill).

Note the dates of the supplied data. The lack of current information displays another system failure.

Our Catholic Church insists that:

Society insures social justice when it provides the conditions that allow associations or individuals to obtain what is their due, according to their nature and vocation. Social justice is linked to the common good and the exercise of authority (CCC 1928).

So, how should Catholics respond to our Nation’s mental health tragedy?

A Gospel Approach to Mental Illness

Catholics must strive to fufill tenets of the New Testament to love our neighbor as ourselves in regards to the least fortunate, including the mentally ill.  Ignorance is destroying lives.

Poverty From an Abundance of Grief

Man-made

from

Ignoring God’s Commandments.

Pain

by

Ignoring the Laws of The Holy Spirit.

to

Profusion of loss

of

Hope, Soul, and Spirit.

for

what could have been.

or

What could They could have been?

The church has a role to play, addressing this ignorance, this stigma.  Deacon Tom Lambert, of the Archdiocese of Chicago, is an example of what one man can do. His daughter suffers from mental illness. In response to the lack of Church resources, he helped start the Chicago Archdiocesan Commission on Mental Illness and the National Catholic Partnership on Disability’s Council on Mental Illness. Twenty-five years later he continues working at the intersection of Catholicism and mental health. He understands the church’s vital role in teaching Catholics about mental illness and reaching out with compassion to those suffering.

Three things: awareness, acceptance, accompaniment. It starts with awareness: educating people about what mental illness is to destigmatize it. I call it “building ramps for the mind.” We build ramps for the physically handicapped, now it’s time to start building ramps that let people feel safe and able to talk about mental health so they know that the church is a place that understands.

The Church’s Role

Deacon Lambert understands our Church can/must play a vital role in helping people suffering from mental illness:

The church isn’t trying to provide services itself, but instead to support the people searching for these services. From a justice standpoint, part of this means putting more pressure on legislators to fund programs that support those suffering from mental illness to make sure that everyone has equal access to these resources.

The church has two roles to play. One is supporting people who are dealing with mental health issues, as I’ve said. The second is a justice issue. People are not getting the care to which we all have a right (Catholics Must Accompany People with Mental Illness).

Catholics have a responsibility to respond to this lack of mental health resources in our country by demanding justice from legislators and reaching out with compassion to the mentally ill.